


dear green and all things cold (burn me right up)

by Anonymous



Series: listen, hum softly; hear the wind whistle its calming tune [2]
Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Dream Smp, Emotional Manipulation, Fluff and Angst, Guilt, Implied Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound - Freeform, Light Angst, M/M, Multi, Pandora’s Vault, Polyamorous Character, Polyamory, Quackity is Power-hungry but he does not realise, Slight Manhandling, Time Travelling Karl Jacobs, badboyhalo is sap’s father, but not really actually i just want clout, grasping for sap lore, main sap + q, only poly karlnapity is canon /r, please, sap is fire demon !, swimming in lava
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29099205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “Dream?” He says.The man looks up, and it’s a sudden motion that he rises, chains chinking. He is not wearing his mask.“Pandas!” He says, and his voice is rough from days of unuse but still wrapping him just the same with the genuineness and warmth of it. “You came!”(Sapnap visits Dream in prison. He also dives head-first into lava.)
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity/Karl Jacobs, Alexis | Quackity/Karl Jacobs/Sapnap, Alexis | Quackity/Sapnap, Clay | Dream & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF), GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Karl Jacobs/Sapnap
Series: listen, hum softly; hear the wind whistle its calming tune [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125770
Comments: 10
Kudos: 327
Collections: anonymous





	dear green and all things cold (burn me right up)

He’s visiting Dream.

Bad idea, supposedly, but it’s not like Sapnap’s always been a sucker for the safe way of doing things. He’s loud, he’s brash, and he’s risky when it’s the worst time to be.

Visiting Dream is the worst time.

It’s early morning nearing dawn when he quietly slips on the netherite boots, pulls a white shirt over his turtleneck sweater. Karl’s sleeping, peaceful, not fretful. His face is the epitome of neutrality, eyes shut, the curve of his cheekbones gently arching down perfectly to form his face. His curls frame his small face, auburn against pale swathes of skin.

Quackity is curled next to him in Karl’s unconscious embrace, and loosely fisting the sheets, Q is sprawled across almost half the bed, arms extended, just missing Karl’s face on his pillow. The beanie sits perpetually on his head. Ebony hair peeks just the slightest out from underneath.

Sapnap leans over, and it’s with a little quirk of his lips that he pushes the tips of his fingers across Karl’s forehead, takes the strands from his sleeping face. He reaches over, lightly hooks his middle finger under the rim of Quackity’s beanie, and a small motion pulls the tight beanie right off. He places the beanie on the bedstand, presses his lips chastely on Q’s eyelashes. He leaves the bed of warmth.

He does not plan on telling either of them. The distance is increasing between the three of them, already, and he’s not going to start the potential heated debate match between anti-Dream Q and him. Karl’s strangely absent when he’s not at their house. Sapnap does not ask where he goes.

All he brings is a single netherite axe along with the matching boots. He’s not going to need the full set.

The door creaks and groans on its hinges when he nudges a shoulder against the surface, steps out to push it back quietly to not wake his fiancés. The bandana is tight around his head under his messy bangs.

The night is silent. He treads carefully, guarded. Stones skitter and slide beneath the unrelenting material of his boots.

The prison looms before him. _Pandora’s Vault_ , he hears, whispered in all its threatening glory. He shudders. It keeps inside someone even worse than itself.

His nerves are skittish, jumpy when he slides near. Sam sits on a chair. Beside him is a lever.

“Hello, Sapnap,” Sam says, looking up from some papers. He sounds surprised.

“Hey, Sam.” He says. It cracks at the end, but they both ignore it.

“You’re going in?”

He pauses.

“Yes. Yes, I am. I think.” The last part is barely whispered like how his voice is reduced suddenly to a mere murmur, and Sam’s body language is unreadable. The googles and the mask obscure his features.

It’s okay, because Sam brings a hand up to grip at his googles and wrench up onto his forehead. (The action reminds him of George.)

His eyes are kind and a calming blue-green when he gazes at his uncertain figure.

“You’ll be fine.”

Sapnap smiles. It’s a little wobbly and a little too fake. “Sure.”

“Call out if you need me, if he makes any move to harm you. Don’t hesitate. He can’t escape.” Sam tells him. He’s next to him, tall, (slightly shorter than Dream), gently manoeuvring him with a large hand on his shoulder, gentle, warm.

Just like Dream used to do.

Sapnap laughs lightly and tenses just a little under Sam’s comforting touch.

“Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

The cell part is hot. Lava flows, unwavering, relentless. Bars interlace together, wound up, nearly impossible to saw through. Obsidian lines the walls. The bitter tang of poison weaves around him.

It reeks of death.

A man in the orange jumpsuit is hunched in the corner. Handcuffs catch the glowing magmatic lava’s light, and chains gracefully arc and link them together, then to the wall.

The man does not acknowledge him yet. His breathing is ragged, quiet, barely heard under the humidity and the soft bubbling of the lava. Sapnap heaves a shaky breath, moves closer towards Pandora’s Vault’s only prisoner.

“Dream?” He says.

The man looks up, and it’s a sudden motion that he rises, chains chinking. He is not wearing his mask.

“Pandas!” He says, and his voice is rough from days of unuse but still wrapping him just the same with the genuineness and warmth of it. “You came!”

He flinches slightly. He fights the low buzzing urge to run.

“Yeah— yeah, I did.”

Dream approaches the front of his cell slowly, chain dragging, clinking when they hit a chink in the obsidian ground. The orange jumpsuit he dons is crumpled, slightly dulled from dirt. He blinks at Sapnap through light eyelashes and smiles widely.

“Did you miss me?”

He bites his bottom lip, eyes darting just a little to Dream’s left, and then back to meet the older’s strangely serene gaze.

“Not really, no.” He lies.

Dream smiles more. His freckles are more prominent than ever against his pale skin.

“You’re lying, Pandas, yeah? I’ve known you for enough to know when you’re lying.”

“You—“ he swallows, thinks better of it. “Whatever.”

When Dream just stares down at him, hair long enough to be bunched messily into a manbun at the back of his head, he shifts, awkward, suddenly at once eleven years old again meeting this goggle-wearing boy and his masked companion.

“What kind of weapon am I?” Is what he asks, and Dream’s eyes flash and he replies with the faintest trace of amusement.

“Weapon?”

“Like maybe, an axe? A sword? ‘Cause you seem to like using me as one.” He swallows.

Dream’s face falls, perfect, designed to reel in and comfort.

“I never used you, Pandas, what are you on about?”

He exhales, shuddering, _angry_.

“‘Never used me’? Then explain ‘I don’t give a fuck about anything really’? Then explain,” Sapnap slams his fist on the bars, and it echoes and creaks in response, “fucking _taking_ the only thing I had in my possession and giving it to the enemy without any threat whatsoever? Explain ignoring me, all those times I asked you, genuinely, do you care?

He laughs. It’s cold. “‘Cause the answer is that you don’t. Never. George? Maybe you do, for him. Me? No. Never me. ‘Cause I’m not worth that to you, if I’m not your little boyfriend, or anyone you could use.”

Dream does nothing but stare. He hates him.

“ _There’s_ my Sapnap.” Dream suddenly says, and he gives him an authentic smile, one that stretches to his eyes and gives him the laugh lines.

 _“What?”_ He sputters.

Dream grins, revoltingly proud. “You stood up to me, Pandas! To the tyrant locked up in his own jail cell he’d asked to be built!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sapnap mutters, and he pushes his fingers into his hair.

Dream hums (fuck him fuck him fuck him) and waits.

Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him.

“Anyway, Pandas,” Dream begins, and suddenly his hand winds through the spaces between two irons bars to grip at his chin and tilts it. His fingers are harsh against his jawline. His touch is scorching, and he almost fucking _sobs_ pathetically like the fucking coward he is.

“You thought you were something?” Dream whispers. He blinks away the tears.

“I know I’m something.” He mutters back. It’s more out of hope than knowledge.

“Is that why,” Dream leans as close as he can with the bars in place, a savage smile ripping through his face, no longer the mask it was, the one designed to keep him like a moth to a flame, trap him with wishes and wants. He’s aiming to hurt where it does. “Your fiancés aren’t even there for you when you always are, twenty-four seven, for them? Is that why, George is unconscious and forever in his magic induced coma, and you’re there, day, after day, begging him to wake, but he never does? Is that why, Badboyhalo, your dad, never once stood by your side and never spent one-on-one time with you ever since he met Skeppy and left your side? You think, if Tommy and Tubbo even care if you’re there protecting them?”

Dream’s smirk is sharp. His damp breaths ghost his skin.

(Fuck you fuck you fuck you)

He’s putty in Dream’s hands. Always have been, frozen, without a leader, without a creator. He is _nothing_ without Dream.

“What a _pity_ ,” Dream hisses softly as lava crackles and pops around them, “you’re so weak. Could’ve yelled for Sam the moment I put a hand on you, but you didn’t, did you, Pandas?”

His breathing is shallow, fast, and when Dream laughs lightly at him and rips his hand on his jaw away, he falls to a heap on the ground, collapses for all he’s worth on his knees.

“Fuck you,” but there’s no bite, no fight, because he’s so fucking _tired_.

Dream stares him down from above. He struggles to resist. But he’s tired, so _tired_ of fighting for others, giving himself away.

Dream slowly, slowly squats, brings himself to his level. He whispers,

“Desist, Sapnap. Desist, for all you’re worth. It’s kinder on yourself, darling.

“Give _up_.”

Dream is suddenly again at the corner of his cell, and he’s heaving gasps, soft ones. He lets the tears fall.

—

He gets back to their house.

It isn’t difficult to find a lava pit once he’s quietly thrown all his minimal weaponry back into the chests, and left again, Karl and Q still strung peacefully against each other, perfect, more perfect than he could ever be.

He shrugs his dark cloak to the ground, and he dives.

The lava is warm, perfect, prickling and smothering, curves around his face, in his hair. It does not burn him. He closes his eyes to the familiarity.

_I was born of fire._

His limbs are numb and loose. He does not carry the tension of a fighter’s stance now.

_Bad found me, young, unconscious, lying near the huge lava pit on netherrack, nothing in my possession except for the bandana around my head. He took me to the overworld. We lived together, and it was him who taught me the beauty of the world around us._

_I was slightly older when I met Dream and_ _George. George was of the overworld, a snappish person, yet wholly protective, and Dream was— strange. He wasn’t of the overworld, but not of the underworld, the nether, either. He held a strange greenish sphere in his calloused hands, hidden under fingerless gloves. It looked like an eye of sorts. I have not asked him what it was. It looked like an ender pearl, yet it wasn’t one. George was too oblivious to answer my queries._

_Water harms me. It singes my skins and encases the exposed area in a weird black layer that’s hard to remove. I hate water._

_I travelled with Dream and George. We traversed lands too unspeakable, fought mobs and each other too many times to count, and we found a quaint little area where we could live together. The first home we built was the community house._

_Bad followed our trail, and with him he brought a man tall as the trees but kind in the heart named Sam, a blonde lady with a black mask who called herself Alyssa, a funky-looking mute donned the name Callahan, and a dark-skinned man who was named Ponk. We graciously allowed them entry into our lands._

_Then more and more people came, seeking for a secluded area with friends. Or to cause trouble and unrest, in a lemon-haired teenager’s case._

_Karl had wandered here after the events of what was to be marked down in history as the War for L’manburg’s Independence, or the L’manburg vs Dream SMP War. It was shrouded with light when he smiled, when he gave me glances that stole my breath and my heart along with it, and it was inevitable that Karl asked for us to get married._

_Then Q came, before Karl did, but we’d never interacted much without Tommy to fill in the gaps. Quackity liked Karl. It was a petty fight over my and Karl’s little marriage plans, but we resolved it when Q grappled at my neck and placed his lips on mine._

_We are still not married. Engaged, but not yet._

_I do not think that we will, with the way things are going._

—

When he finally, finally surfaces from the lava, Q is there. Surprise, surprise, really, and he shrugs off some of the lava from his shoulders, pants lightly as he runs numb fingers through soaked hair.

“Hi,” he croaks.

“Hey, Sapnap,” says Quackity, and he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the lava pit. Sapnap’s cloak is nestled quietly in between Quackity’s legs. Q’s fingers play with the rough material absentmindedly. He’s not wearing the beanie.

“I though you were sleeping,” Sapnap says, just to break the weird silence that’s cast itself over them, unwelcome. 

“I was,” Quackity shrugs, voice slurring, his voice rough from sleep. “But I woke up. You weren’t there when I did. The axe wasn’t on the ground but in the chest and I figured huh, maybe you’d gone out.”

“Oh.”

“Did you even sleep last night?”

“Not really,” he says. “Wasn’t sleepy.”

“Oh.” Q says as Sap shoulders forward and places his arms on the edge of the pool, half his body still submerged.

“Do your clothes not burn?” Q asks.

He quirks his lips. “No. I enchant them, you know, or it’ll catch on fire the moment I wear it or something.

“How’s Karl?” He asks.

“I don’t know. He wasn’t there when I woke up. Kinda disorienting, you know, when both the people you went to bed with disappeared when you woke up.” Q says offhandedly. He waves a nonchalant hand. Sapnap’s heart twists in guilt. The one time he gives time to himself, he’s needed.

“Sorry.”

“‘S okay, it wasn’t too bad.” Q shrugs it off.

“Touch-starved, Q?” Sapnap smiles.

“A little.” He admits.

They stew in silence. Q’s fingers drag over the fabric and dip and slide under folds.

He gives a little sigh.

“You went to see Dream, didn’t you?” Quackity snips the moment right through. He winces.

“Maybe.”

“Goddamn it, Sap. He’s nothing good. Don’t grace him with your presence.” The older rolls his eyes.

“Too late for that.”

“What’d he say?”

“Stuff,” he keeps it vague, “you know, stuff with Tommy and George, I guess.”

“Is that how he sees you?” Quackity arches an eyebrow, “just someone to talk about his problems with? A venting machine?”

Sapnap shrugs. “Don’t know.”

“I bet he said more than that, but it’s your choice, you know, if you wanna tell me or Karl.”

“I know.” He says, then Q reaches a hand and traces his cheekbone with the tip of a finger, grounding.

“Where does Karl go?” He tries, and Quackity looks up and meets his gaze with uncertainty.

“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me.”

But ultimately it’s his choice. Choice is what they’ve always preached about in the relationship. You choose to share your burden. If you choose not to, the rest wouldn’t press. _Choice_.

Choice is a horrible, horrible thing if they feel like they don’t have one.

He can’t _choose_ to make Karl stay. He can’t choose to shut Dream out. He can’t choose to stop this ugly swelling thing in his chest that has laid dormant until Dream awoke it with his carefully pointed words, his hard gazes.

“‘M sorry,” Sap says, breathes out.

“For what?” Quackity says, and the younger heaves himself out of the lava pool. Some splash and singe small holes in Q’s exercise jacket.

“Everything. I don’t know.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It might as well be.” He says, quiet. His legs still dangle into the pool and he reaches his hand out to graze the bubbling lava.

“You don’t have to protect _everyone_ , Sapnap.”

“I have to. Or I wouldn’t feel right.”

“It’s not your obligation, Sap. Sometimes taking care of yourself is enough.” Quackity chuckles. “Sometimes you give so much of yourself that you’re left with nothing, Sapnap, and it’s frankly not healthy.”

“It’s not that— well, it may be some of that. It’s a lot, Quackity, and it worries me that—“ tears suddenly spark. He blinks them rapidly away.

“It worries me that I can’t keep everyone safe, can’t stop things from changing.” He rushes out, drops his head, closes his eyes.

“It’s okay.” Q smiles at him, scorching fire, hotter than even himself.

“You have to let go, sometimes, but some things are worth fighting for.”

“You?”

Quackity laughs.

“If you think that.”

**Author's Note:**

> twitter is [@mistionii](https://twitter.com/mistionii?s=21)


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